A self-service response system to improve nutrition impact symptoms management among home-based patients with advanced cancer and their family caregivers

Objective: (NiS©), for managing nutrition impact symptoms (NIS) in home-based patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers. Methods: A human-centered design was adopted in this study. It covered two main stages with six phases: (1) system development, including study team establishment, design requirements definition, user requirements definition, and NiS© prototype creation; and (2) system usability evaluation, including expert user experience reviews, and usability testing with end users to assess task completion rate, accuracy, time-on-task, and user satisfaction measured by the Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ) and semi-structured interviews. Results: The developed evidence-based NiS© system comprised four core modules: Self-Report, Intelligent Response, Knowledge Base, and Feedback Interaction. System usability evaluation demonstrated positive performance, with all tasks achieving 100% completion and accuracy rates. The average task duration was 8 minutes and 10 seconds (standard deviation [SD] = 31 seconds), and the PSSUQ yielded a mean score of 1.77 ± 0.03, indicating high user satisfaction. Qualitative feedback revealed strong user acceptance of NiS©, with participants emphasizing its practical utility and user-centric design. Additionally, participants provided actionable recommendations across three domains: (1) computational efficiency improvements for real-time responsiveness, (2) feature expansion to support personalized adaptive workflows, and (3) linguistic calibration for enhanced conversational naturalism. Conclusions: NiS© is a user-centric, evidence-based, self-service system designed to deliver personalized NIS management support for patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers in homecare settings. Rigorous randomized controlled trials are warranted to establish its therapeutic efficacy across diverse healthcare ecosystems.